Weekly Wrap Up-Week 2

Another good week here! I feel that we have a good routine going and I'm really happy with the material that we are using. For once I feel no need to tweak, I never thought I'd see this day. Now let's just hope that it lasts :)!

Here's the rundown of our week...

Language Arts: Princess finally got into The Sword and the Tree! She kicked it into high gear and finished the last half of the book in two days. We'll add a review sheet for this book to her reading notebook sometime this weekend. We completed week 2 of Writing with Ease and I'm so glad that I got the workbook for this as it has made it to much easier for me to do (thanks, Linda!). We also talked about what makes a sentence and a statement with Good English and completed another week of Dictation Day by Day for spelling.

Math: We worked on multiplication and division with 5, which princess handled well. We finished the week with a mental math sheet reviewing the 3, 4 and 5 facts. I let princess use manipulatives for this. I have put together unifix cubes in groups of 2, 3, 4 and 5. We pull these out and uses them to skip count her way through her multiplication facts. Here's what it looks like... History: We spent the week reading a book called Our Celtic Cousins. This is a wonderful old book that weave tons of history through a storyline about two boys. So far so good. We have also been working on making our own illuminated manuscript. Hopefully it will be done next week, so I can share pictures of it.

Science: We spent the week talked about the sun. We started our wall sized solar system, here's a look at the sun...
Princess was fascinated by solar spots, so that's why our sun has several of them!

Other: We watched more of the BBC Animated version of As You Like It on you tube. I love these videos, they are a great introduction to Shakespeare for this age group. We also read more about King Arthur and looked at another painting by Giotto di Bondone. Princess completed her first art project of the year, which was a still life using a pen (so that they can't erase), here's the result (it's a purse, a candle and two pixie sticks)... Education of Me: I have been frantically trying to rewrite Biology for the Grammar Stage since 4 of the six books have gone out of print in the last two months, grrrr! Hence the lack of blog posts. Even so, I finished Stories of Beowulf and I am shocked to say that I actually enjoyed it. I remembered hating reading this in high school. I think it's because it was a snippet view, watered down, poorly done version. Now I'm actually looking forward to reading the real poem and sharing it with princess. Maybe there is something to this whole classical education thing :)!

That's a look at our week, hope you had a great one! You can read more weekly reports at the Weekly Wrap-up.